Greg Paul is an independent researcher who specialises on dinosaurs; he’s well known for his popular articles, books and technical papers, but in particular for his hugely influential artwork. Paul’s most recent book – the 2010 Dinosaurs: A Field Guide (aka The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs) – is, simply put, the ultimate Greg Paul book. [...]

We all love identifying – or, trying to identify – weird carcasses. Back in December 2011, marine biologist and world chiton expert Douglas Eernisse of the University of California (Santa Cruz) sent me the series of photos you see here and below. They show a smallish cetacean (total length about 3 m), found beached and [...]

Virtually all people interested in animals are aware of the so-called ‘mystery big cat’ phenomenon. Large, often black, cats are reported with apparent frequency from the eastern USA and the UK. But the phenomenon isn’t unique to those two areas. Here, we’re going to look specifically at the ‘mystery big cat’ phenomenon in Australia. The [...]

I’m feeling on a roll with the obscure colubrid snakes, so here are some more (see the previous article if you feel like you need an introduction). Again, the photos are used with kind permission of Bangor University’s Wolfgang Wüster unless stated otherwise. Mastigodryas bifossatus (photographed here at Sao Paulo in Brazil) is a slender-bodied, [...]

By night, I work as a technical research scientist, writer of papers and so on, but by day I walk the beaches of the world, looking for partially decomposed mystery carcasses and identifying them. Kidding: of course I don’t, but you get the idea – thanks in no small part to the Montauk Monster flap [...]

Neat observations are published on animals all the time. Many are relatively mundane, or are additional records of things we already know about. But some are really fantastic and have the potential to open a whole new chapter in our understanding of behaviour, ecology and evolution. As we’ll see, even if they’re not brand new, [...]

I really like finding out about, and writing about, obscure tetrapods. And that’s not a difficult thing to do, since there are some pretty big, pretty diverse tetrapod groups out there that contain huge numbers of poorly known, little-mentioned species. I’ve come back to obscure snakes on a few occasions, and here’s another article where [...]

Welcome to part II of my ‘review of the year’/Happy 6th Birthday Tet Zoo stuff. The previous article took us up to May or thereabouts. Tet Zoo – still based at ScienceBlogs at this time – gave us the viviparous sauropod meme, part VII in the pouches, pockets and sacs series (still not finished), and [...]

It’s that time again. Today is January 21st, meaning that it’s this blog’s birthday. Lo, for the internet blogging sensation known as Tetrapod Zoology came into being on this very day, six years ago. Yes, SIX YEARS ago. As is normal on Tet Zoo birthdays (or blogiversaries), it’s time once more to look back at [...]

Sorry for the silence here at Tet Zoo – Eotyrannus is keeping me busy, and no time for blog-writing. In desperation, I wanted to share this, originally posted on ver 2 in 2009. I don’t know about the rest of the world, but in Britain there is a very entrenched tradition of ‘feeding the ducks’. [...]